“The meaning of the past is never finished.” Hannah Arendt (1906–1975). From her Between Past and Future (1961), where she argues that history is not closed or complete, but morally alive, awaiting renewed attention, responsibility, and understanding.
Last week, I found my way to a small library tucked behind a hardware store in Deltaville, Virginia. It was the sort of place you might drive past without ever knowing it was there—a quiet, cream-colored building softened by climbing vines and brightened by a mural where hummingbirds hovered and monarchs drifted above a riot of painted flowers. A sailboat logo and a modest white sign announced Middlesex County Public Library — Deltaville Branch, a name that made the place feel both official and intimate at once. Nothing about it was grand, but everything about it felt intentional. Step through the doors, and you are immediately reminded why libraries endure: they do not shout their importance; they simply keep offering it.
I had been invited to speak about Unmasking The Humourist: Alexander Gordon’s Lost Essays of Colonial Charleston, South Carolina, a project that has occupied a surprising amount of my life. But as I stood there, in a room filled with people who had given their afternoon to books, it became clear that what I was really there to talk about was not a colonial essayist at all. It was about the invisible network of librarians, teachers, archivists, and patient institutions that had made that work possible.
Nothing I have written would exist without them. Not the book. Not the essays. Not even the questions that led me to them.
For most of us, research looks solitary. A scholar in a reading room. A book on a desk. A voice speaking from a distant century. But none of that happens without a vast, quiet scaffolding behind it, made up of people who catalog, preserve, teach, fund, and protect the materials that others one day come to use.
Libraries quietly hold information—sometimes for centuries—without knowing who will need it, or when, or why. They preserve voices long after those voices have gone silent, trusting that someday someone will come along prepared to listen carefully.
That afternoon in Deltaville, surrounded by that small but devoted group of Library Friends, I realized I was standing inside the visible tip of something much larger. A chain of care that stretches across generations, linking a colonial newspaper, a Charleston library, a community college system, and a branch library in the heart of the Chesapeake Bay.
My own place in that chain began long before I knew it. When I was a graduate student in the early 1970s, I stumbled across a series of anonymous essays published in the 1750s in The South-Carolina Gazette. A leading scholar, Leo LeMay, had remarked that they were among the finest essays in all of early American literature and had urged that someone edit them, publish them, and identify their author. The challenge sat there for decades, unanswered.
What allowed me to return to it was not individual brilliance, but institutional grace. I spent twenty-five years at the Library of Congress, learning how archives think and how preservation outlasts any single lifetime. Later, the Virginia Community College System gave me something just as precious when I turned fifty: the chance to become an English professor, a dream I had carried since childhood. And then, when I was named Chancellor’s Professor, it gave me a two-year appointment that provided something more precious than funding. It provided time. Time to think. Time to return to unfinished questions. Time to do the kind of slow, careful work that real discovery requires.
That is why educators and educational institutions matter so deeply in this story. They do not just transmit knowledge; at their best, they grant permission. Permission to linger with a problem. Permission to follow a hunch. Permission to trust that careful thinking is worth the investment.
Being in Deltaville also gave me something I had not realized I was missing: the chance to thank Glenn DuBois in person. Glenn was Chancellor during two important turning points of my professional life. He was Chancellor when the Virginia Community College System first welcomed me into the classroom at age fifty, and he was Chancellor again years later when I was named Chancellor’s Professor, the appointment that made this work possible.
We rarely get to look someone in the eye and say, simply and honestly, “You changed my life.” But that afternoon, in a small library behind a hardware store, I did. It was one of those moments when gratitude stops being abstract and becomes something you can actually feel in the room.
The essays I eventually brought back into the light turned out to belong to Alexander Gordon, a Scottish-born scholar and singer who lived in colonial Charleston. But authorship matters because it allows us to place a voice in a life, a mind in a world, and a text in a tradition.
There is a Jewish folk belief that a person dies twice: once when the body stops, and again when their name is spoken for the last time. If that is so, then archives are a kind of moral infrastructure, designed to keep names from slipping into that second death. Every catalog entry, every preserved page, every carefully tended collection is an act of faith in the future.
So is education. When the Virginia Community College System opened its doors to me in midlife, it did not just give me a job. It gave me a second beginning. Without that second chance, the first version of my curiosity would have remained unfinished.
All of this came together for me in that small Deltaville library. A place without marble columns or grand staircases, but full of the same quiet dignity that animates every serious library anywhere. People had gathered not to be dazzled, but to listen. To care. To take part in the long human habit of keeping stories alive.
Today, Gordon’s voice is no longer anonymous. His essays are no longer orphans. A lost body of work has been restored to its author, and a chapter of early American literary history has been set right. That restoration belongs not just to a scholar or a book, but to the institutions that made it possible—to libraries that guard knowledge, to educators who foster discovery, and to communities that believe the past is worth preserving.
All proceeds from my book go to the Virginia Foundation for Community College Education, which feels exactly right. Libraries and community colleges share the same moral instinct: they exist to hold doors open, not to keep people out.
I left Deltaville with a deeper gratitude for the fact that nothing we do alone ever really is. Behind every footnote stands a librarian. Behind every discovery stands a teacher. Behind every second act stands an institution willing to say yes.
And behind every recovered voice stands a chain of quiet, faithful human hands, passing something forward because they believe someone, someday, will need it.
“The past is a source of knowledge, and the future is a source of hope. Love of the past implies faith in the future.”
–Stephen Ambrose (1936-2002; American historian and biographer. The quote is from his Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West, 1996).
No doubt you’ve heard me own up to the sad reality that I am a packrat. I keep everything. Letters and all other forms of personal correspondenceincludingholidaycards. (Scattered here and there; some loose, some bundled). Canceled checks. Remember ye olden days? (Scattered here and there; some loose, some bundled–the canceled checks, silly, not ye olden days, though they’re certainly scattered and shattered to smithereens, sometimes for the better.) Emails going back to forever. (Scattered on flash drives by and large; some printed; both courtesy of my good friend of longest standing with whom I have exchanged more than 23,000 emails since we first met. She’s hoping that if our virtual world disappears after our real world does, someone might be guilted into keeping the printed emails as proof that once upon a time we were.) Taxreturns. (Organized by year, as I recall, in two filing cabinets–one in my office; the other, in a teeny-tiny space, with slanting ceiling parallel to the slant of the descending stairs above.)
I have held on to all of these treasures in the full belief that by now I’d be unrich and unfamous and that the tax returns, emails, canceled checks, and letters/correspondence/cards would be helpful to the unbiographer who isn’t with me working on the unbiography that they’re not writing.
Now, however, I confess that more than once, I’ve been tempted to toss it all into the fire as of no worth, but I dare not do so until I review it all carefully. Since I keep everything, who knows what other valuables I might have tossed into a folder knowing that the best way to hide anything is in plain sight, but over time, I forgot what I put where.
However, with Federal Tax Day upon us, what better time than now to scrutinize all of my tax returns going all the way back to 1969. My God! I must be deranged to have kept all those tax records, especially since the IRS has no such requirement. I don’t think it does, at any rate. Let me check. BRB. Okay. Here’s what the IRS says:
“1. Keep records for 3 years if situations (4), (5), and (6) below do not apply to you. “2. Keep records for 3 years from the date you filed your original return or 2 years from the date you paid the tax, whichever is later, if you file a claim for credit or refund after you file your return. “3. Keep records for 7 years if you file a claim for a loss from worthless securities or bad debt deduction. “4. Keep records for 6 years if you do not report income that you should report, and it is more than 25% of the gross income shown on your return. “5. Keep records indefinitely if you do not file a return. “6. Keep records indefinitely if you file a fraudulent return.” [Emphasis supplied. Leave it to the IRS to take us from the ridiculous to the sublime. Let me make it perfectly clear right here, right now: I kept all of my returns and not one–no, not one–is fraudulent. Wouldn’t that be stupid. I mean to file a fraudulent return and keep a copy of it on file. “Excuse me, your honor. Right here in Exhibit A is proof that my tax return for 19– is fraudulent. I’m so glad that I kept a copy so that I could have my day in court and prove my point, your Honor. A fine plus five years? But, your Honor, I kept all of my records. Don’t they count for anything?] “7. Keep employment tax records for at least 4 years after the date that the tax becomes due or is paid, whichever is later.”
OMG! I have no idea what any of the preceding means. Maybe I never did. Maybe that’s why I kept all these damned documents all these years.All I know is this. Right now, I’m so dizzy that I’m about to faint. Excuse me for a sec while I chant. You’re dizzy, too? I understand. Let’s do it together:
● Let’s close our eyes. ● Now, let’s take a handful of deep, calming breaths. ● Let each exhalation be a “letting go” of any tension or worry. ● Let’s take a slow, deep breath. ● On the out-breath, let’s chant the single word: “Ohhhhhhhmmmmmmm.” ● Let’s repeat again and again and again until we can no longer say IRS.
Ahhhh. I’m feeling much better now, and I’m enjoying my desired Ohhhhhhhhhhmmmmm outcome. In fact, my tongue is tingling so much that I couldn’t say IRS if all of my unfraudulent tax returns depended on it.
Thank you so much for chanting with me. To reward you, I’m going to give you a rare treat, probably never heard of before in all the annals of blogging. I’m going to review all of my tax records and treat this post exactly as a producer would treat a reality TV show. You know, where ordinary people do extraordinary things, like argue over who forgot to buy the milk or dramatically flip a pancake for the camera. My words will be my mic and my camera, and what you read will be me, live, unscripted, minute by minute, as I open tax folders that have not been opened in decades, and it all unfolds right here on my Mountain top in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley: ordinary me going through my ordinary, real-life tax files, hoping for your sake and mine that I find something extraordinarily extraordinary, but whatever I find you’re going to get it: the good, the bad, and the whatever. (But not all. Some things must be left to the imagination. Just sayin’.)
Hotdayumm! Is this exciting or what? Shall we start? Are you ready? Yes? Me, too! Let us go then. You and I. A lifetime of tax returns awaits us.
OMG! I can’t believe it! I opened the file cabinet drawer in the closet beneath the stairs, and the folders are arranged in perfect alphabetical order, just as I knew they would be. I see a folder with a typed label: INCOMETAXES. I am surprised, doubly. First, this folder is thick, about an inch or so. Second, unlike the other tax folders, the label on this one does not specify a year. I am intrigued. I have no idea–absolutely no idea–what’s inside this generic, non-date-specific folder.
Good God! I know that I’m a packrat, but I didn’t know that I’m apparently a moron, too. It’s no wonder this folder is so thick. I kept not only my tax returns but also the instruction booklets. But hold on here just a minute. Maybe I’m not a moron after all. I wonder, DearReader, whether you have an original IRS instructional booklet from the 1960s? Do you? Be honest! I bet you don’t. I’ll bet the IRS doesn’t. I’ll bet that even the Library of Congress doesn’t. I just did a quick review of all of my tax folders. It appears that I have the original instruction booklet for each year since I first filed taxes. I have an entire “run.” I’m betting that these booklets are worth a fortune. I see a golden future ahead of me. Soon and very soon, I’ll be featured on Antiques Road Show.
Now, I’m really wired, but I can’t continue. For now, I must cease and desist. I have some shopping to do. It’s clear to me that these moronic tax folders of mine deserve the White Glove treatment.
I’m back from shopping. But here’s the thing. In reality, sometimes we don’t get what we think we deserve, and sometimes, historically significant tax folders don’t get what I’d like to think that they deserve, either. I couldn’t find any white cotton gloves that would fit me, and I’m not about to slip on latex.
So here I am, perusing these tax folders with my bare hands. Actually, I love being able to feel the texture of the paper. Papers do differ, you know. The instructional booklet paper is thin, lightweight, and porous. The tax return paper, on the other hand, is a little thicker, heavier, and smoother, intended to be kept, perhaps indefinitely for anyone who might have filed a fraudulent tax return.
At this point, I’m so glad that you’re readingme rather than watchingme on reality TV. I don’t think crimson is quite my color, and yet my blush right now is even deeper. This is so embarrassing, but since I promised to reveal all, I shall. Bear with me.
Down through the years, and even at the start of this post, I’ve told anyone and everyone–even rank strangers–that I had kept all of my tax returns going back to 1969. Looking back, I wonder why I thought those files started then. Undoubtedly, it’s because 1969 was when I began my 25-year career at the Library of Congress. But what I discovered in the one-inch folder that I’m exploring now is that I actually filed my first return in 1967, two years earlier than I remembered.
Guess what else I discovered? Apparently, I didn’t keep a copy of my 1967 tax return. I have to confess the same for my 1968, 1969, and 1970 returns. Goodness. This is far more embarrassing than I ever dreamt that it would be!
Oh. Don’t worry. I have copies of those returns that I had forgotten about! Here’s why and how I got them. For tax year 1971, I used the Five-Year Income Average method. However, since I hadn’t kept the prior four years, I had to write the IRS and request copies! I have a copy of my original request. It’s a handwritten, carbon copy on onion skin paper. A few months later, I sent the IRS a follow-up request. It’s a typed carbon copy, again on onion skin. I guess I thought that a typed letter might result in the requested action that my handwritten request had not achieved. It did. My copies arrived, I filed my return, and here I am, looking at them nearly six decades later.
No doubt, you’re wondering about my taxable income for those years. I promised bare reality, so here goes:
I have to say that as I looked at my tax records, I wasn’t focusing at all on income. Instead, I was focusing on the memories that washed over me as I looked.
Take, for example, my 1967 return. By today’s standard, $1,604 isn’t much, but it was a small fortune for me as a sophomore at Alderson-Broaddus University. The income, though, is totally eclipsed by the work experience that gave me my earning opportunity. As an undergraduate, I was required to have two off-campus experiences. I could have opted for the university’s educational programs in Switzerland or Mexico. Instead, for my first one, I decided to orchestrate my own internship experience that would let me live for a few months in our Nation’s Capital. Looking back, I’m not certain how that notion found its way into my head. Further, I’m not certain how I ever came up with the idea of an internship with Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV).
But I did both, and of this, I am certain. With unwavering determination, once I had lined up my internship with Senator Byrd, I knew that I’d be moving to DC and that I had to have somewhere to live. Looking back, I am surprised by my ingenuity and my boldness. Equipped only with DC Yellow Pages and a rotary telephone and undaunted by the challenge, I found myself an apartment at McClean Gardens in northwest DC, right off of Wisconsin Avenue and just a few blocks from the Washington Cathedral, St. Albans School for Boys, Sidwell Friends School, and the Washington Ballet. In my mind, an apartment near those landmarks meant one thing: I’d be discovering city life while living in a safe neighborhood. Then, armed with courage, I further surprised myself when I packed up my bags, got a one-way Greyhound ticket from Philippi (WV) to DC. When I arrived late at night, I took a metro bus from downtown out to my McClean Gardens apartment. For three glorious spring months, amidst the bloom of new beginnings, I enjoyed living in the shadow of the Washington Cathedral and working in the hallowed halls of Senate Office Buildings, House Office Buildings, and the U.S. Capitol.
Or what about my 1969 return. Again, the taxable income of $2,932 is anything but impressive. But I will always remember that summer, that fall, and the opportunities that allowed me to earn that income.
The summer months found me immersed in my second internship in DC, at the former Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Division of the Two-Year College. It was an extraordinary transformative opportunity that shaped my perspective on education and the world, but amidst the whirlwind of learning, one moment stands out above all others: the historic July 20 Moon Landing. I vividly recall the anticipation and excitement as my fraternity brother and I, sharing a modest apartment in Capitol Heights, MD–just across the DC line–resolved to witness this monumental event. Strapped for cash and lacking a television, Tim and I scrounged together enough change to afford a single beer each at a local bar on nearby Marlboro Pike, nursing it patiently through the evening until American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin made history by setting foot on the lunar surface. Armstrong’s immortal words, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” reverberated through the air, etching themselves into the annals of human achievement and forever echoing in my mind.
The fall months, starting in September, found me beaming with pride when I was my appointed to a position at the Library of Congress as a MARC Editor. (Yes. I was appointed, not hired. Yes. It was a position, not a job.) I gave up my apartment in Capitol Heights, I sold my Chevrolet Bel Air, and I moved into an apartment at 200 C Street, SE–now Capitol Hill Hotel–a block away from the Library of Congress. Days found me as an Editor in the John Adams Building, at that time known as the Library Annex. Evenings found me as a Reader/Researcher in the Library’s Main Reading Room of the Thomas Jefferson Building, where the grandeur of its architecture served as a backdrop to my dreams. As I immersed myself in the serene ambiance of the Main Reading Room, I couldn’t help but be captivated by the intricate architectural details. The soaring ceiling, adorned with elaborate frescoes and intricate carvings, seemed to reach towards the heavens, instilling within me a sense of awe and wonder. As I wandered through the upper-level alcoves, tracing my fingers along the spines of ancient tomes, I found solace in timeless beauty.
I could continue looking at my 1971 Five-Year Income Average tax return, and I could share with you other memories from those early years. Then, I could keep right on going with all of the subsequent tax returns that I have held on to down through the years, along with their counterparts: the emails, the canceled checks, and the various forms of personal correspondence.
However, just by examining one small section of one thick tax folder, I’ve unearthed a treasure trove of significance. These tax files, meticulously kept over my lifetime, hold a value far beyond what I initially anticipated. They serve as far more than just financial records; they are windows into the chapters of my life. Each line item, each deduction, anchors me to specific moments and places, serving as poignant reminders of my journey—where I’ve been, who I’ve become, and the person I continue to evolve into.
As I reflect on the journey through my tax records, I realize that these seemingly mundane documents hold far more than financial data. Through the haze of numbers and figures, I glimpse moments of triumph, of uncertainty, and of growth. In these records, I unearth not just financial transactions but the very essence of my existence, woven into the fabric of time itself.
In preserving these records, I’ve safeguarded not just financial history, but personal narratives. They serve as markers of my evolution, from the eager college student navigating the halls of power in Washington, D.C., to the budding professional finding my footing in the corridors of the Library of Congress.
Each tax year returns a story, not just of income earned or taxes paid, but of experiences, challenges, and aspirations that shaped me. They are reminders of the resilience and resourcefulness that carried me through moments of courage, doubt, and uncertainty.
Taxing though we may be, let’s give a shoutout to the packrats, the keepers of memories, the custodians of personal history. May we never underestimate the value of our archives, for within them lies the essence of who we are, where we’ve been, and the dreams that propel us forward.
As I close these tax folders–Just for now, mind you; I will open them again moving forward–I do so with a newfound appreciation for the richness they contain. In the end, it’s not just about the numbers, but the stories they tell, and the legacy they leave behind. I’ve discovered treasures far beyond what I ever imagined. I am grateful for the journey they’ve allowed me to relive and the memories they’ve helped me preserve and hold tight.
DearReader–whoever you are and wherever you are–may your own archives be a source of inspiration and reflection to you, too, reminding you of the moments that define you and the dreams that fuel your journey. May your own journey through personal records echo the profound discovery and appreciation that mine has evoked, reminding you of the richness of your own narrative.
The Wired Researcher 